4.14 Wrapping Up a Share Package

The releases of share packages are independent of releases of GAP. Therefore share packages should be wrapped up in separate files that can be installed onto any version of GAP. Similarly a share package can be upgraded any time without the need to wait for new releases of GAP.

Because it is independent of the version of GAP a share package should be archived from the GAP pkg directory, that is all files are archived with the path starting the package's name.

The archive of a share package should contain all files necessary for the share package to work. This includes a manual.six file in the documentation subdirectory which is created by TeXing the documentation. If the package provides a substantial amount of code, especially if it is intended to be loaded automatically, create a completion file (see Package Completion) and include it with the package.

We use the ZOO archiver to provide GAP archives and we ask you to use this format for your share packages. If zoo is not installed on your system, you can get source code for example at

ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/pub/archive/tools/zoo

ZOO by itself archives all files as binary files. This may lead to minor problems when viewing files on DOS or Macintosh systems, which use a different textfile format (CRLF versus LF). To overcome such problems we use the following mechanism for the GAP archive files, which is supported by the unzoo we are providing (but is unfortunately not part of the standard ZOO format):

All files are archived as Unix versions. (If you are using a Windows PC or a Macintosh the easiest way to achieve this is to ftp the files in text mode to a Unix machine and do the archiving there.)

In ZOO one can add comments to files. Whenever a file gets a comment !TEXT! this file will be considered as text (respectively one can enforce binary mode by a !BINARY comment) and unzoo will extract it accordingly, adding a CR on non-Unix systems.

If you are using the standard UNIX version of zoo the command

zoo c archive.zoo filename

!TEXT!
/END

Normally, all files of a share package except dvi files or special binary files are text files.

If you are unsure about the format, you can use the ``list'' feature of ZOO on an existing package (for example XGAP) to see all files with comments:

zoo lc xgap.zoo

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